Chapter 1: Watching the Detectives

AUTHOR'S NOTE: What you are about to read is the third story in a set of three, meaning if you haven't read the first two, you're gonna be lost. The first story (Gun, With Occasional Hella) and the second (Legend Has It) are right there when you click on my name. Coda will still be here when you get back.

Enjoy the show...

November 9, 2019

A private investigator named Chloe Price was sitting in a metal folding chair in a side room of a non-denominational church in Seattle, Washington. As she scratched under the collar of her tuxedo shirt, she looked at the other two occupants with which she shared the small (and curiously lemon-smelling) room that, on days not being used for weddings, had been mostly used for storage.

The first of these occupants was a nine year old little boy named Jared Price, her cousin, the son of the brother of her late father William. Chloe's mother Joyce had kept in touch with Chloe's uncle after William's passing, and made sure both of these Price men got invitations to the wedding. Jared, for his part, was looking down at a pillow, upon which rested two gold rings. The little boy sighed as though he'd rehearsed it.

"How you holding up, little man?" Chloe asked.

Jared looked from the pillow to Chloe, his little blond eyebrows almost coming up to meet in the middle, like he'd been done a grievous wrong and had no other recourse with which to retaliate.

"Dad took my Switch," Jared said. "I was playing Minecraft."

"The monster," Chloe said.

Jared nodded at this. "I know, right?"

Chloe looked from Jared to the third occupant of the room.

Also in a tuxedo that matched the two Prices, Ryan Caulfield, father of the other bride Maxine, stood by the doorway.

"How you holding up, little man?" Chloe asked Ryan.

Ryan shrugged and said "My little girl's getting married today."

"Well, if it makes you feel any better," Chloe said, "your little girl's been married since August."

Which was true. On August 30 of that year, Chloe Elizabeth Price had married Max Caulfield in an impromptu ceremony on a street corner with an audience of no one, presided over by Seth Newman, who was the Mayor of Arcadia Bay, Oregon. This, of course, was one day before Chloe had used the magic time travel ability she'd had at the time to fulfill an ancient prophecy and unravel a massive storm that was threatening to destroy the town.

Chloe's life had, until recently, been a very odd one.

"What prompted you to do that, by the way?" Ryan asked. "Getting married on a street corner?"

Chloe took in a breath, about to say that it was a spur of the moment thing, but instead opted for the truth, which was:

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

Ryan shrugged. He looked at Jared, as though the little boy was a foreign spy itching to pounce on the valuable intelligence he was about to share with Chloe, before he internally waved it off and walked up to her.

"Um… I don't know how this works, two women marrying each other."

"Well," Chloe said, "when two women love each other very much…"

"I know how that works, he said. "I just… The two of you are going all out today. Traditional-like, and…"

"And?"

"And a lady should be walked down the aisle by her father," Ryan said.

Chloe nodded. There had only even been two central father figures in her life. The first was her own father William, who had died in a car crash when Chloe was just fourteen. The second had been the man her mother had married some years after, David Madsen, who had been an asshole. Joyce and David divorced in 2016 after he and the dipshit militia buddies he had fallen in with had been arrested for occupying an Oregon bird sanctuary in an ill-advised and totally ineffective protest against the federal government. David had even been forced to email Joyce and Chloe pleading for care packages of food because the morons had forgotten to bring any with them.

"So," Ryan continued, "being that Vanessa would be more than happy to walk Max… If you'll have me, I'd like to walk you."

Chloe blinked a couple of times, and said the first thing that came to her mind.

"This was Max's idea, wasn't it?"

Ryan, instead of acting offended as Chloe would have predicted, just smiled.

"Can't slip anything past you, can I?"

"I'm a detective."

"You just really enjoy saying that, don't you?"

"When it's true, yeah, why not?"

"So…"

Chloe leaned back. She had spent most of her life never thinking she'd even get married, let alone get married in a church, or even be walked down the aisle. And now that the day had come, she had gotten used to each idea in rapid succession, so much so that she had almost forgotten to be moved by Max's idea and Ryan's willingness to carry it out.

Almost.

"Thank you," Chloe said. "I'd, um… I'd really appreciate that."

Ryan bent down and put her hand on Chloe's shoulder.

"It's my honest pleasure," he said. "You make my daughter very happy. And to think, when the two of you were little, you pretended to be pirates in my backyard."

"Yeah," Chloe said. "This must be really weird for you."

"You don't know the half of it."

It was it this point that a third gentleman entered the room.

Neither Chloe nor Max cared a whit for sticking to gender roles when assembling their assorted wedding parties. Chloe (who wasn't comfortable in anything that didn't involve pants) would have a Best Whoever, and Max (who wanted to rise to the challenge of rocking a wedding dress) would have a Whoever of Honor. Chloe, for her part, stuck to the traditional gender thing when selecting Arcadia Bay police officer Trevor Cade as her Best Whoever.

Max did not, and it was her Whoever of Honor who had, just now, decided to make an appearance.

Warren Graham put his hands in the pockets of his tuxedo jacket and smiled at Chloe.

"Hey," Chloe said. "Where's Trevor?"

"Out there with Dana and Brandon," Warren said.

"Can, uh… Can I see her?"

Warren shook his head. "It's bad luck to see the bride before the wedding."

"Fun Fact," Chloe said, ""We're already married. Even Funner Fact: I am also the bride."

"Well, then, now you know how high the stakes are," Warren said. "Killer bow tie."

Chloe ran her thumb along the bow tie around the collar of her shirt. "Thanks," she said. "I had to look up a video on YouTube to learn how to tie it."

"Why didn't you use a clip-on?"

"Because Max didn't want me to," Chloe said. "Why, did…"

And as though he had read the question she was about to ask him in advance, Warren yanked the black clip-on bow tie off his neck and held it up, grinning like he'd performed a magic trick.

"Victoria would have killed you rather than let you out of your hotel room in a clip-on tie," Chloe said.

"Well, Victoria's not here, now, is she?"

This was true. Warren's wife, Victoria Chase, had borne a massive, almost bloodthirsty grudge against Max Caulfield, to the point that she did not accompany him to the wedding. It had been this way since the two women had met at Blackwell Academy in Arcadia Bay in 2013. This was no doubt exacerbated by Max's actions on October 7 of that year, whereupon she stepped in front of a bullet fired by one Nathan Prescott, saving Chloe's life. Nathan went to an insane asylum for his actions, and said actions linked himself to the actions of Mark Jefferson, who was a rapist, a murderer and, at the time, a photography teacher at Blackwell. Victoria had cared for both of these men before their foul deeds had come to light, and it was Chloe's theory that, even though Victoria knew both of these men were terrible, she could not forgive Max finding that out before she had.

Jefferson was still in prison for what he had done. As for Nathan, he had pulled off the not-inconsiderable feat of dying almost fifty years before he had been born.

At this juncture, it is worth noting a second time that Chloe Price's life was an odd one.

Chloe ran a finger along her bow tie one more time, and stood up.

"She insisted I wear a real bow tie," Chloe said, "and I have no idea why…"

June 6, 2014

Max had helped her pick out the suit for tonight.

The pants and the jacket were dark blue. The shoes and the belt were black. The shirt was white, with two buttons undone and a necklace with three bullets as the pendant underneath. No tie.

She looked around her darkened bedroom, sighed, and made her way downstairs.

By the little tack board near the front door, Chloe's mother Joyce was waiting, phone in hand and smile on face.

"My little girl's going to the prom!" she said. "Hold still, let me get a picture."

Chloe had to suppress a groan, but she stood up straight, wiped a lock of blue hair from her cheek, and put on her best facsimile of a smile.

After the picture had been taken, Joyce walked up to Chloe.

"Make sure Max takes a selfie of the two of you and sends it to me," she said. "Max loves her some selfies, so I know she'll take it, and if you say she didn't want one, I'll know you're lying."

"This doesn't weird you out, does it?" Chloe asked. "Me going out with Max?"

Chloe wanted to say "with another girl," and she got the feeling that, despite what she had said, this is what her mother heard.

"I expected you to get knocked up by some meth-head biker named Travis," Joyce said. "And you come home with little Max Caulfield? I'm supposed to say no to that?"

"Okay," Chloe said. "Are you sure… y'know… he's okay with it?"

Chloe tried to put as much stank on the subject of that sentence as she could. Out of sight, sitting on the living room couch watching Nascar, was David Madsen, the stepdouche himself.

"I don't give a single damn what he thinks," Joyce said, "and neither should you."

A male voice, complete with a Southern accent, made its presence felt from the living room. "I heard that."

Joyce craned her neck toward the living room and yelled "Good!" before turning back to Chloe.

"Have fun, dear."

After her assurances that she would, Chloe got into The Beast, her rickety old pick-up truck, and made her way to Blackwell.

She made her drive with the radio off, letting the flow of these last few months, the inexorable progression of events, wash over her.

Chloe did not know Max was in town when she had stepped in front of Nathan Prescott's bullet for her. In fact, in the five years that separated the day Max had left Arcadia Bay for Seattle in 2008 and the day she had gotten shot in 2013, Max had sent not a single text or a postcard or a letter. She had popped up instantly, when Chloe had needed her the most, to save her life.

Almost as though she had known what was going to happen ahead of time.

But the price that came with her death's reprieve was a steep one. Not only was her former best friend shot, and in a coma, but Nathan's arrest led to the devastating revelation that Rachel Amber, a girl Chloe had had every conceivable feeling for, had been murdered by Nathan after she had been abducted by Mark Jefferson. Rachel had been missing since April, and Chloe had taken it upon herself to lead a one woman crusade to find her. And while logic dictated that the worst must have happened to her, Chloe would only have given up hope with teeth and finger-nail marks scrawled across its surface.

Between the time she had learned of Rachel's death and the day that Max woke up from her coma, Chloe occupied her time in the instances she wasn't on epic crying jags pondering her place in the world. Whatever fates and furies governed over the linear progression of events had both given and taken away in such bounty that Chloe felt herself a plaything in the grip of something large and vastly unknowable, prodding her in different directions at once and peering keenly at her reactions.

This feeling did not go away, as the day of Rachel's funeral just so happened to be the day that Max woke up from her coma. She had been trying to find a meditative state after the wrenching her heart had been through during the funeral, and that state was hopelessly broken by the comatose Max gripping her hand. And the first words Max said to Chloe upon waking up were:

"Are you okay?"

And Max had shown that level of sensitive attentiveness throughout the next couple of months, never taking it personally when Chloe cried, or raged, or wanted to be left alone. But even this was… off… somehow. She remembered that when she told Max all about Rachel, she just kept nodding her head in a way that crept upon the impatient, as though she knew all this stuff already.

And even this had a new wrinkle added to it on a night in December after what turned out to be the final Vortex Club party, when Max, drunk on both Bud Light Lime-a-Rita and hope, kissed Chloe under a streetlight as the snow fell.

After a period of shock (and greasy hangover food from the Two Whales Diner), both Max and Chloe decided to see where this new development would go. And six months later, it had to second base—for both of them—with each itching for the next guy up at the plate to hit a double.

So deep was Chloe in thought that she didn't remember pulling out of her driveway, let alone pulling into a spot in the crowded Blackwell parking lot.

The Prescott dorm was quiet, as Chloe figured it should have been, with the students having already packed to go home at the close of the school year.

Chloe knocked on Max's door, and waited.

What opened the door was a vision in strapless, light gray silk. Max's hair was done in one of the classier ponytails Chloe had seen, with bangs almost coming down to her eyebrows. Max even had makeup on.

"Wow," Chloe said. "There's the whole nine, and then there's… Wow."

"Thank you," Max said.

"Even the makeup, though."

"Dana helped me with it," Max said. "I couldn't put the eyeliner on without poking myself in the eye."

"Would it be bad form if I thanked her?" Chloe asked.

"No," Max said. "I did. What do you think of the lipstick?"

"I like it."

"It's plum. Red made me look like a clown. It's no-smear."

"What does—"

Max cut her off with a kiss. As deep a kiss as a person could manage without using tongue. Eventually Max pulled away, wiped a finger across Chloe's lip and showed it to her.

"See?" Max asked. "No-smear."

"Impressive," Chloe said, letting her breath out.

Max looked at Chloe's hands. "No corsage?"

The fires of hell burned between Chloe's ears. "I was supposed to bring a corsage?"

Max smiled. "I don't know. I don't know how to do the prom thing."

"Me neither," Chloe said. "I never thought I'd go to one of these."

"Uh-huh."

"I'm antisocial. And angry. And—and… Gay."

Chloe looked Max up and down again. "Tonight, in particular."

Max smiled wider, and said "You shush."